Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By : Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler
Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By: Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler

Overview of this book

This book is an immersive guide to take your ArcGIS Desktop application development skills to the next level It starts off by providing detailed description and examples of how to create ArcGIS Desktop Python toolboxes that will serve as containers for many of the applications that you will build. We provide several practical projects that involve building a local area/community map and extracting wildfire data. You will then learn how to build tools that can access data from ArcGIS Server using the ArcGIS REST API. Furthermore, we deal with the integration of additional open source Python libraries into your applications, which will help you chart and graph advanced GUI development; read and write JSON, CSV, and XML format data sources; write outputs to Google Earth Pro, and more. Along the way, you will be introduced to advanced ArcPy Mapping and ArcPy Data Access module techniques and use data-driven Pages to automate the creation of map books. Finally, you will learn advanced techniques to work with video and social media feeds. By the end of the book, you will have your own desktop application without having spent too much time learning sophisticated theory.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ArcGIS Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Converting iPhone photos to a feature class


In this step, you'll write a tool that processes a series of photos taken with an Apple iPhone. The tool will extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of each photo and write the information as individual point features in a feature class stored in a file geodatabase. Coordinate information for the photos can be extracted using the Python PIL module. In a later step, we'll update the script to also copy the photos to Dropbox.

Perform the following steps given, to create a custom ArcGIS Python Toolbox and tool to process the photos:

  1. Before completing the steps in this section, you will need to download and install the Python PIL module. Open a Command Prompt, type the following command, and press Enter. This assumes that you have already installed pip from the previous chapter. Windows installers can also be found at the project downloads page at http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/. We have the following code:

    pip install PIL
  2. Open Catalog...